El Edwards Talks Purpose And Meaning

March 28, 2011 by 5 Comments

Mondays aren’t always such fun.

But I was privileged to spend an hour or so of mine today with El Edwards, interviewing her as part of my occasional series on purpose and meaning.

If you haven’t met El, she’s the woman behind the site Truth Passion Joy. She’s a writer & digital strategist on a very interesting mission: to empower children & young people to do work they love by inspiring their parents to show them it’s possible.

You might recall I talked about her in my kick-off post. One of the things I really admire about her is the way that she has allowed her sense of purpose to evolve in the public eye.

So I was interested to learn more and share it with you.

We did record this as a video, but the visual quality is poor. Nevertheless, using El’s technical wizardry, we uncoupled the audio, and here it is for your enjoyment.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(If you’re listening via RSS or a mobile device, please click here to listen online.)

I’d love to hear, in the comment section below, what insights El’s journey prompts in you.

 

Filed Under: Inner work, Reinventing work Tagged With: , , ,

Tired Of Thinking Like An Ugly Sister? Step Into Your Cinderella Slippers and Rock!

March 25, 2011 by 21 Comments

It’s epidemic.

Smart, talented people, out of touch with how capable they are.

Waiting for some fairy godmother to come along and make it okay for them to wear the coveted crystal slippers.

You know how it is. The boss you want to endorse you. The client you want to adulate you. The community you want to follow you.

Of course, that’s not what you show the world. Out there you put your best face forward and get on with things. But behind the mask, the theater make-up is cracking.

You come to me because you feel you should be more than you are. Confident, successful, happy. A mixture of all three. You want to stop feeling so fearful and anxious about things that other professional people seem to sail through.

Cinderella, you just don’t get that the crystal slippers were yours and yours alone in the beginning.

And, while you’re getting your head round that last line, here’s a little more story to share how the metamorphosis from ugly sister to Cinderella happens.

Feeling phony

In the beginning you use words to describe yourself that bring tears to my eyes.

“I’m pathetic,” you’ll say. Or, “I’m crap.”

“Any moment now and I’ll be discovered for the phony person that I am,” you say.

Like your years of study count for nothing. Like your hard work has never been translated into great job offers, promotions and client wins. Like there’s not a group of folks around who have only solid respect for you.

Indeed, you share your surprise for the nice things people say about you. It confuses you. Doesn’t make sense.

I offer back your paradoxical positions. That other people rate you. That you don’t rate yourself.

You start to get a little curious of the gap.

The Gap

You start to see that it’s such a painful place to live. And yet you know it so well. It has been a constant throughout your life.

Except now it’s killing you. You’re tired of it. The energy required to keep managing the difference between the outside and inside you is huge, and taking its toll.

You do a little reading around or even talk to some other folks. There are badges you can wear to explain why it’s okay for you to think like you’re an Ugly Sister when you’re really Cinderella.

Control freak is one with which you identify. Closely followed by Perfectionist.  There are loads of them in the business world. At least identifying with them gives you a faint sense of belonging.

Dig further and you might find some psychologists telling you that you have an Inferiority Complex. That you live in a perpetual state of needing to prove to yourself and others how good you are.

They may even snigger and nod and tell you that most of the people in top jobs and in positions of power have this kind of thing going on. That it’s what drives them to set higher and higher expectations for themselves from which other people benefit.

I ask you if these labels really serve you; if they really help assuage the tension in your soul. If they help the Cinderella locked inside, tending to the fireplace, when she really wants to go to the ball.

You tell me, “Not really.”

How come?

But you do want to understand how come Cinderella got locked away in the first place. And, en route to unleashing her, we spend some time on the backstory.

Often there’s the tale of the bright child whose ability was so taken for granted that you were never able to cement it in the foundations of your own being. The parent who always went looking for the missing 2% of a 98% exam success. And how you learned from this never to see how phenomenal your achievements are, but to focus instead on your inevitable human errors.

Alternatively, I hear the one about the parent whose own need to be validated and endorsed was ahead of yours, leaving your hunger for positive mirroring unsatisfied. So, that you learned to seek, but not to expect or take in, validation from folks you interact with.

Poor Cinders

I feel sorry for your pain.

But we don’t dwell there. Ugly Sister thinking may have held you back in the past, but it doesn’t mean you’re destined to feel like the poor relation forever.

So I ask you what was missing from back then that you need to give yourself right now.

“Permission to be okay,” you say. “No matter what.”

“Permission to sparkle and shine?”

As I ask you that, I see you cringe. You don’t want to be big headed and pseudo-egotistical like some of the people you brush up against.

So, I now challenge you with the polarity of your options. “On the one hand, you feel you need to disown your strengths. On the other, you think you have to rub them in people’s faces. Isn’t there another way?”

You shall go to the ball

You’re silent. Thinking. Daring to touch the gift of who you are.

“I suppose there’s also my own way,” you say.

“Your own way?”

“Yeah, just allowing me to be myself.”

“Stepping into your own Cinderella slippers and rocking?”

You laugh. You’ve changed state and I can hear and see it.

I ask you how it feels to connect with your own way.

“Liberating,” you say. “Like I’ve just cast off the weight of the world.”

“That’s because you have,” I say.

This is no fairy tale

Thing is, this is not a fairy tale. It’s the kind of place people get to in daring to do deep change work on themselves. It’s the kind of work I love being party to. And I’ve seen it for real, in different formats of this, in my life and work this week.

So how about you? Do you have what it takes to step out of Ugly Sister thinking and into Cinderella’s shoes.

Or are you going to keep waiting for someone else to do it for you?

photo credit: Denzil~

 

Filed Under: Self Development Tagged With: , , ,

Hero Or Failure: You Decide

March 21, 2011 by 7 Comments

Last Friday I was writing about working on purpose. And over the weekend, I was asking myself what makes the difference between times when I am really able to do that versus those when I’m not.

I got to figuring that it all came down to what I was telling myself about the likely outcome of things at different points in time.

If you’ve worked with me or have met me, you’ll know that for most of the time I’m a pretty upbeat, buoyant person. In that frame of mind, I’m unstoppable. I’ll have an intuition of what it is I need to achieve and I’ll just go for it.

But there are other times when my sunny disposition gets caught in a down beat, and realizing my mission feels more remote.

Hero or failure – so much of it is down to how I’m believing the story will end.

And that’s the way it is for all of us.

We’re all actors in our own stories, each with our own purpose, irrespective of how fully baked or not that is. And like the key characters in our favourite novels, films or soaps, whether we achieve our mission – no matter the scale of the difficulty in doing so – is largely down to us.

You think the story metaphor here is a little far-fetched?

Well, just think about it. We’re all meaning makers. Things in our lives have their own logic; their own intrinsic cohesion. We make sense of what we meet when we come into the world: how our parents relate to us, or not; how we fit in relative to everyone else; what things our cultures influence in us. From all of that we develop the schema for the plots and sub-plots, the characters and conflicts, that will keep our personal dramas intact. We start to think and behave in ways that protect the integrity of it all.

Along the way we learn whether our character part is more naturally a hero or a failure. And this has a huge influence on how we relate to our sense of purpose.

Hero

If the meaning you’ve made of things early on is that you’re mostly set up to win, that’s the sense of things you’ll continue to expect as life unfolds for you.

Dealing with a tough situation in your career where your sense of purpose is in conflict with something you’re being asked to do? Wondering whether you dare take the next intuitive step in your solopreneur business, even though it means breaking the mould of how you’ve so far presented yourself publicly?

If you’re hard-wired for a good ending, even in the face of significant sacrifice and adversity, that’s what you’re likely to have. It’s not that you are fearless or without doubt; it is that your story has laid down for you the lines that make it possible for you to move beyond these.

Failure

If, on the other hand, your story has an unhappy or unsuccessful ending, that’s what you’ll constellate.

Attempts to push past a career block just land you back where you started. Ideas for taking your business to the next level die on the vine. Somewhere along the line you’ve learned that people like you don’t win. Or, more strongly, that people like you fail. Doesn’t mean your sense of purpose isn’t there; just means it’s not being allowed to manifest.

Becoming The Hero In Your Story

Some experts will tell you that, if you want to switch from your losing story, you just need to understand what made it compelling for you in the beginning.

Others will go to the opposite extreme, and teach you affirmations for overcoming your shortfalls.

Both of these have their place, but they overlook something that the story metaphor can help with.

Because, seeing your life and work through that lens allows you to choose to fundamentally rewrite your story. You can decide that in your story you will be a hero, and that you will get on board with your mission even if you don’t yet know all that that entails. You can choose to slay your own dragons and move past your character flaws, even if at times, like me, they sometimes ensnare you.

For sure, this takes work and vigilance, but I figure it’s worth it.

What about you? What’s your story? Does it help propel you forward in realising your purpose, or does it stunt your growth? What different choices and changes can you make?

Creative Commons License photo credit: ssoosay


Filed Under: Self Development Tagged With: , ,

How Safe Is It To Work On Purpose In a Dodgy Economy?

March 18, 2011 by 12 Comments

Purpose. That’s a word that some New-Agers have cannibalised to the point where I often want to disown it.

That is, until I’m talking to people who are trying to grapple with it because they’ve got to the inescapable point in their lives of wanting purpose to be what drives them, and finding themselves struggling to articulate it.

And it’s a tricky one to navigate. Still, you know you’re in its vicinity when you’re asking yourself questions like:

  • What’s my life all about?
  • What’s unique and different about me?
  • How can I bring my purpose to life through my work?

I was chatting to blog wizard, Michael Martine the other day about this very thing. I was telling him that I admired how he didn’t just give the same advice to everyone, but had this rare ability to believe everyone was unique and to work with them from that place. He wrote a great post the other day about how being the only one at what you do isn’t easy or safe. You should read it.

Yet it’s what so many of us feel we want to be.

The only one

One of the things I struggle with when I read about this stuff more generally is the myth that there’s some great formula through which to put yourself in order to get clarity about what being “the only one” looks like. Yes, some people just know what they need to do with, or achieve from their lives. But for many others, it’s more of a journey than a destination.

It’s a process of becoming.

I reflect on my lovely friend El Edward’s journey into knowing her purpose. She’s known for a while that she’s a Dream Catcher. But here’s what a new level of clarity this week allowed her to write yesterday:

It’s not all woo woo hand-holding. I’m also here to help you in practical, technical ways. Whether you need a blog or a website or some training or even if you just have a how-to question, you’ve come to the right place.

And as I write about El, one of the things that strikes me about her is that she hasn’t stopped writing and working in the process of iterating her purpose more and more clearly.

Don’t wait for crystal vision

I think there’s a view in some quarters that you need to know what your purpose is before you start to live it.

But I disagree. I realised just how much recently, when I was grappling with my own sense of purpose – again. Someone I was reaching to for advice told me that they thought my problem was that I needed to decide whether I was a coach, a psychoanalyst or a business consultant. Like what I am couldn’t be my unique blend of all three, and more. Also, being an active learner, I need to experiment to get a sense of what does and doesn’t work for me. Trying to logic it out might work for some, but again not for all.

My advisor’s perspective brings me to another point too. Some folks will understand their purpose in the language of traditional job titles. But I wish it was always that easy.

And that’s part of the challenge. How do you describe what your purpose is in language folk can “get” when no-one, let alone yourself, has expressed YOU before.

How will you ever get that career move, or that business audience if you can’t say what it is you’re about?

Can you really live on purpose and make money? How?

Even scarier is the question of whether you can live on purpose and make money in a dodgy economy. I’ve had this conversation with some folks in the last weeks too. “Shouldn’t I just stop trying to define it and go back to doing what I’ve always done?” they ask.

It’s as if, in the UK at least, the current climate has sapped grains of safety that existed until the financial crisis. A little part of me sometimes thinks that’s part of the purpose of what’s happening now. To generate fear; the kind of fear that will put us back in our boxes and stop us from believing that we have a right to live and work on our own terms, when everything in the world of work and employment is a little rocky.

But then there are those for whom what’s happening right now is fuel to the fire. It’s giving them even more determination that they are going to allow themselves to get sharper and sharper about purpose and to live in a way that has integrity with it.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be interviewing, writing about, and hosting guest posts from everyday folks who are deciding it’s safe to work on purpose despite what else is happening. My intention is to give you real life examples of how people are finding their way through the mud, and share with you a ton of inspiration.

I have some cool stuff already lining up. But, if you’d like to take a slot and tell your story here with my readers, please get in touch with me at christine@adifferentkindofwork.com and say something of why it’d be so great for me to include you in this series.

Meantime, what’s your take? Can you ever really, really be clear about your purpose? And is it safe to go after it in ailing economic circumstances?

Filed Under: Thriving @ work Tagged With: , , ,

How To Re-Engage With Your Job (Even When You’d Really Rather Not)

March 14, 2011 by 5 Comments

You didn’t imagine you’d be sat there much longer. But the uncertainties in the marketplace are making your job search or longed for promotion take more time than you’d hoped.

One of the most soul-destroying things is turning up for a job every day when you outgrew it some time ago, but need to stick with it so that you can make the money that pays the rent or mortgage. Time drags, you feel exhausted, and the whole thing can feel pointless.

You might tell yourself that this is okay for you. But is it really? On the one hand, life’s too short to be miserable for a considerable chunk of it. On the other, if you let your disengagement run, you take the risk of under-performing at a time when your career – and your employer – need you to be working well.

So much of re-engaging, even if you’d rather not, comes down to breathing some positive energy into yourself. Here are five ideas to help kick-start your enthusiasm:

  • Choose What This Time Will Mean. If you allow it, the current scenario can seem both endless and meaningless. But you can take back some power by deciding what this time will mean for you. For some it might be about making sure you stay in a good financial place; for others it could be about developing some quality or skill in yourself. Find the positive opportunity and go after it.
  • Avoid the news. If you watch too much news at the moment, you’d be forgiven for feeling beyond depressed. It can have the effect of taking us beyond our sphere of influence to things that are black, but which we can do little to influence. Maintain a healthy curiosity in what’s going on by all means, but make sure your focus stays on the things in your life and work that you can control.
  • Set short term goals for yourself. When one week merges into the next, it’s easy to feel that you’re not achieving much. You can give yourself another experience by becoming ruthless about setting yourself weekly and daily goals. Things you’ve been putting off? Things you’d really rather not? Get them on the list and confront them. Then watch your spirits grow as you tick off each item.
  • Lean on your professional networks. Connect with some of your peers on- or offline and see how things are going for them. Reaching out beyond yourself and your current role can be both normalizing and inspiring.
  • Invest in life. If work at the office is tedious, help yourself to keep your energy bank topped up by making sure you have good things to engage with in other parts of your life: your partner, family, friends and hobbies. And manage your work/life boundaries too. You might think you should struggle into the office even if you’re ill, or sit there into the wee hours in case a client calls. But you’re almost certainly doing yourself more long term harm than good in the process. Don’t neglect your self care in tough times. At the end of the day, you are all that you have.

    •  

These are five things that work for me and for folks I work with. How about you? What stands out from this list? And what haven’t I thought of that you’d add?

Creative Commons License photo credit: Dennis Wong

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Thriving @ work Tagged With: , ,

Simply Grateful

March 11, 2011 by 10 Comments

This isn’t the post I thought I’d publish today.

That was something about the Zen of the 9-5, and keeping your head when all around are losing theirs. Driving back from my morning coffee ritual, I was hatching the story line, stopping from time to time to take happy eyefuls of verges lined with golden daffodils, and fields full of early spring lambs. What a fabulous day, I thought.

Turning on my Mac brought me to another reality. The news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Maybe it’s because it comes on the back of the recent earthquake in New Zealand, and the flooding in Australia. Maybe it’s about the sheer scale of the thing on its own. Whatever, I am again engulfed by a sense of my smallness – and indeed of all our smallness – in regard to something so huge, uncontrollable and powerful. I feel sad for the world and its people that we are victims of such suffering and devastation. I feel helpless to be able to do much beyond giving my prayers and making my credit card donation.

But the whole thing is also putting me in touch with a big feeling of gratitude for my own life.

For my beautiful, loving, ever-supportive partner.

For my family and friends.

For the gutsy, determined people with whom I work.

For my very good health and well-being.

For my home in the country and the village community that seems to be more and more welcoming.

For the daffodils, and the lambs. And spring pushing its way through after a tough winter.

For my gifts and talents, however small.

Today is reminding me that life is short and that we must never take it for granted. How is it affecting you? What is making you grateful for?

Filed Under: Inner work, Self Development Tagged With: , , ,

Warning: More Government Insanity About Jobs On The Way

March 7, 2011 by 1 Comment

job - Me gustas tuYou’ve got to love the UK coalition government. A couple of weeks ago they were expressing disappointment that the private sector may not, after all, be able to pick up the slack on public sector job losses. And today Iain Duncan Smith pronounced that the unemployment issue is really one of inefficient job matching.

“It’s not the absence of jobs that’s the problem. It’s the failure to match the unemployed to the jobs there are.”

Priceless.

The naivety that even in an environment of price and tax increases, the private sector would have buoyant employment itself beggars belief. But quite separate to the economic concerns, the number balancing myth being espoused shows a complete lack of understanding about organizations and people.

The whole thing is being looked at as a pseudo-logical, two dimensional problem. And it isn’t.

First, public and private sectors serve different purposes. The organizational cultures between, and among them vary widely. I’m not saying that one is better than the other; they are just different, and no account is being taken of that. Nor of people’s ability or readiness to adapt between one and the other.

Second, the skills, talents and mindsets that people need to be successful across the piece vary widely too.

This dehumanizing stand of trying to force-fit people to job vacancies, even by providing retraining, pays scant attention to what best brings people alive. Sure there are jobs out there. But how many of them are jobs that would make you happy to get up in the morning? And there’s still a war for talent raging that even retraining is not going to assuage.

Beyond everything else, the whole approach is being looked at and managed from an increasingly outmoded concept of work.

It’s ignoring that underneath all of this government imposed mayhem, there’s a quiet revolution afoot about what work is and how it should be brokered. It’s taking a status quo attitude to something that’s already changing at a deep level.

Which means that the whole thing just feels more and more crazy. And I see only more craziness on the horizon.

What if you’re stuck in the middle of this?

I speak to people across public and private sectors who are in the middle of big upheaval around work right now. Particularly in the public sector, it’s so difficult not to feel a deep sense of betrayal and confusion about what’s going on. The contract you had – the psychological contract – around your work for the government has been unilaterally rewritten. And you are left wondering what’s happening.

It’s difficult not to take on the government’s insanity and think it’s yours; to see yourself as being somehow disappointing or to be failing in some way. And to feel disempowered at a time when you need all your creative resources supporting you.

But that craziness isn’t yours. It’s theirs, although they’ll never own it. And you need to believe this in your heart of hearts to get yourself through the impending “work crunch” ahead.

How else are you staying positive in the current mad times? What can you share here that would be of benefit to others in helping them get a great outcome from a difficult moment?
Creative Commons License photo credit: ronada

Filed Under: Corporate jobs Tagged With: , ,

How I Recovered From The Evil Grip Of A Vampire Boss

March 4, 2011 by 2 Comments

Maybe it’s because it’s spring and they can smell the sap rising. But after a dormant winter, news of a plague of vampire boss attacks has reached my real and virtual office again this week.

How can you tell if your boss is a vampire? Well, if you’re constantly feeling exhausted, that nothing you do is good enough, that you must go along with their view of the world, even if you disagree, and that you must stay on tenterhooks around them for fear they’ll go for you, there’s a fair chance you’re in a vampire boss’s grip.

Hearing and working through my people’s challenges this week brought back to mind my own struggles with a vampire some years ago, and indeed, what I learned from the journey to recovery.

Because, you can nod along here, even smile, as you recognize the phenomenon I’m writing about. And you can imagine that that’s just the way things are, and that you have to put up with it. But you don’t.

Getting your groove back takes guts and courage for sure. But it’s far from impossible when you figure how to.

Beguiling vampire charm

In my case the vampire was a hard-nosed New Yorker. Incredibly smart, with books to her credit on leadership and strategic organization design. The internet talks about authority figures. In her field, she was an authority figure sine qua non.

When I first met her, she was charming. Later when I hated her guts because of how miserable I was feeling around her, I could nevertheless see how she used her apparent charisma to woo folks into her very sticky spider’s web. And I had immense respect for the cleverness that sat alongside the insanity.

Because underneath the mask she had no interpersonal skills. She was quite devoid of any concern for anyone other than herself. It was this ruthlessness I figure allowed her to propel herself from one tenuous success to another.

And I don’t exaggerate. When I first confided in my HR person about it, he diagnosed the issue as being a problem with our relationship. One that could be fixed. And he organized a team coach to help.

The coach had us do a battery of psychometrics to help us better understand, and broker, the diversity in our personalities. One of the questionnaire was FiroB. It looks at and helps compare preferences in interpersonal behavior. From it, our coach told us that whereas I scored highly on areas of inclusion and affection, she scored low to zero. Where I scored moderately to high on confidence, her score was more distorted, indicating a high need for control.

The intervention dissolved with no resolution. But it gave me the most phenomenal insight into the vampire’s mind. It made me realize that she had neither the need, nor the vocabulary for understanding or relating to me. While I was being profoundly affected by her behavior, she was untouched by mine. I didn’t want to be in a working partnership that was purely transactional and where I would not be valued or understood for me.

There were five stages in kicking ass and in recovering.

1. Permission To Be Okay

For a long time, and with her breathing down my neck, micro-managing and criticizing my every move, I’d felt so not okay. Which was weird, because I’d gone into this consulting job from having been an HR Director and a good one at that. To get to a point where I felt so unable to think, or to make my own decisions, was beyond debilitating.

If she was so right, I had to be wrong. Right?!

So, the first step I took was to give myself permission to be okay. I may have had a different perspective from her. That didn’t mean I was less than.

That thinking allowed me to feel more resourceful again, and put the brakes on the psychically draining effect of the vampire.

2. Leaning on community support

For a while I’d felt alone and isolated in my experience. But then I noticed other people having a not dissimilar time of things and, although there was a sense of taboo about it, we began to talk and compare notes. And indeed support one another.

There can be something so normalizing in having a good old gossip!

Knowing that I had that support, even at times when I was not actively leaning on it, was strengthening.

3. Experimenting

Feeling somewhat more buoyed up, I began to be able to listen to my own good intuition again and to act on it more. I started noticing, rather than being affected by, the games she played with me. There was one where, in joint client meetings, I’d recommend a course of action to a client and she’d sit, shake her head and laugh as I was saying it.

I just started to see her as rude.

And I’d trust too the response of my client, and the result my client got by taking my advice. When, on the whole, my world view began to reassert itself and pay dividends again, my confidence in my own abilities grew.

Then, I could even find her funny.

It was at that point that I found the courage to trust in my own value enough to raise my concerns about her to a more senior audience. I knew that I took a huge gamble when I said to my managing partner, “I cannot continue to work on your team if she remains here. It’s your choice, reassign her or me. Either way, I’m fine.”

To my huge delight they took her, not me, off the team.

4. Exhaustion

The relief of “outing” what was going on for me was huge. But I was suddenly beyond exhausted and for a good few weeks I slept all the non-working hours I could. At a level, I had made myself ill by being around her. I’d got so used to being in stress adapted response mode the whole time that I couldn’t see the damage it was doing. But I started to understand that getting better was going to be more than just a psychological thing.

It wasn’t easy, because I don’t like admitting to not being on form, but I gave into it, pulled back from lots of non-essential work and social things for a while, and treated myself kindly.

5. Deep contentment

Even before the exhaustion lifted, a real sense of happiness began to coalesce around me. I started to be able to enjoy life again, to find pleasure in things. To enjoy my work in a way I hadn’t for months. To start feeling natural and in flow with it again. That was so delicious.

I did ultimately leave the consulting company to work for myself. But the vampire experience taught me much, and has served me well for the coaching and counseling work I now do.

Bad people?

In my experience, most vampires don’t consciously intend to be bad people. They behave from the place of their own original wounding, and we get attracted to them from ours. Of course they can change if they want to. But if we’re caught in the effects of their mind-numbing energy, it’s us that have to do the recovery work on ourselves. And that doesn’t make us bad people either. Just powerfully human for being able to work with and learn to master ourselves.

This phenomenon is becoming more and more understood and empathized with. If you’re in its grips, take permission from me that you are okay, find your community and use its power to revitalize you. You’ll get your groove back before you know it.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Tomi Kukkonen

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Self Development Tagged With: ,

5 Golden Career Rules Your Parents Taught You (And Why You Should Ditch Them)

March 1, 2011 by 13 Comments

Daddy's Little GirlMaybe you were one of those lucky kids whose parents were pretty sorted, and supported your self-actualization growing up?

I wasn’t, and neither were most of the people I work with.

It’s not that our folks were bad (okay, actually some were awful). Sometimes they just taught us too well how to fit into the world, and particularly to the world of work.

Here are 5 career rules I hear, their positive intention, and the dangers of swallowing them down whole.

You’ll never get on without qualifications

Mum and Dad knew from their own experience of either having qualifications or not that most businesses favor them. Of course they do. Qualifications say something of your general ability, your willingness to knuckle down and put yourself to the test. And, when starting out in your professional life they allow you to show that you have what it takes to stand out from the crowd. For many lines of work, you simply won’t be considered without them.

But the fixation for qualifications like university degrees has marginalized more artisan and maverick career routes. It can also stop in its tracks a natural talent to do a particular line of work without prior study. I think about some folks I know who have a raw talent for coaching, but who get put off by the hype that you have to have studied. My advice to them? Pay for the best supervision and start coaching anyway. Sure, you can get qualifications down the track. But for some things talent and badges of study should not be confused as the same thing.

Don’t job jump

Here, your parents were trying to protect you from giving the impression that you’re not reliable, committed and loyal. It’s true that recruiters look at the length of time you’ve stayed in any one job. For more professional roles, you have to give a job time in order to bring about sustainable results. If you’ve moved quickly from one role to another while claiming to have changed the world, hirers may be suspicious.

The downside of this rule is that you can feel obliged to stick at a job that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t for you. It’s one thing to create the brilliant career on paper, quite another to live it out day by day. There comes a point where hanging in there for the sake of following a rule can at best dent your confidence, and at worst make you ill. You need to protect your well-being. Without it, there is no career. Sure, if you quit a job quickly you’ll be challenged. The key is to be very clear and very positive about why moving on was the correct professional decision for you.

Don’t have gaps on your CV

It’s related to the point about job jumping and indeed is held up as a reason for not quitting something you dislike. Again, in teaching you this rule, your seniors were making sure that a pile of judgments weren’t heading in your direction about being lazy or unemployable.

However, it’s a myth these days that people work from cradle to grave. Increasingly, people switch track, have times of personal review and evolution, have years where they put parenting or other interests ahead of careers. The point is not to play these down or disguise them. The point is to know the cohesion and integrity in your own story and to be clear about what you offer now.

Put your career before everything else

What your parents were trying to instil here was the sense that doing well in anything requires focus and discipline. Again, of course that’s true.

The danger comes when that message gets interpreted as meaning you should be so single minded that you forever put anything other than work aside. What gets forgotten in this position is that there are not limitless opportunities on when we can enjoy things.

Take the example of a guy I spoke with recently. A board member of a highly successful firm, he had spent his entire life putting work first, in the misguided belief that he could have “life” at some point down the track. Now, a couple of years from retiring early and enjoying the fruits of his efforts with his family, his wife has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Amazingly, when we began talking at first, his first concern was how he could make arrangements for her to be cared for in order that he keep working.

You can’t make money doing what you love

The old dears were trying to save you years of wasted effort with this one; didn’t want you to go down a route that would leave you miserable and penniless. (And them without a successful son or daughter through which to be successful themselves.)

The danger here is that you instead spend years solvent, but miserable for other reasons. Locked into avenues of work and study you don’t care for; not allowing yourself to imagine how things could be different. Of course, we all live in a society where money is the collateral with which we fund life. But the challenge is how to do what you love and be financially viable. For a lucky few, both these things will be incorporated in their day-to-day work. But if that’s not you, don’t believe that you have to put your burning interest aside. Make sure to feed your soul by finding a way to do it as a sideline or hobby. It’ll enrich the side of you that works to ensure your cash flow.

Some of the career rules we get socialized to live out serve us well enough. But many serve our governments, societies, and the very institution of work better than they serve us. The trick is to be savvy, make conscious what rules you’re living under, and decide which ones you’ll keep. And, which you, frankly, need to kick into touch.
Creative Commons License photo credit: BoonLeeFamPhotography

Filed Under: Reinventing work, Thriving @ work Tagged With: , , ,